The Heartbreak Comedy of “One Mississippi”

The semi-autobiographical series mines what Tig Notaro has described as her “worst year ever.”

The show has compassion for those struggling to reconcile a messy family history.

Illustration by Laura Breiling

In an early episode of “One Mississippi,” the dark comedy that Tig Notaro co-created with Diablo Cody, Notaro, the show’s star, tugs her shirt off and turns away from a mirror. Then, just before the final credits, she undresses again. This time, she doesn’t turn away. Instead, she lets us look at her as she looks at herself, a wiry butch woman of around forty, wearing jeans, her chest scarred from a double mastectomy, her eyes glittering with something that can’t be reduced to amusement.

The moment felt like a thesis statement: it’s better to look directly at the damage. The semi-autobiographical “One Mississippi” mines what Notaro has described as her “worst year ever.” It’s about a cancer survivor, Tig Bavaro, who flies home to Bay St. Lucille, Mississippi, as her mother is dying, and then sticks around after the funeral, haunted by bad memories. Miraculously, the series goes down like a cocktail, crisp and sweet. It’s a romantic show as well as an angry one, sometimes successfully and sometimes less successfully absurdist, and authentically Southern in a way that is rare for television. It floats and it flows.

The series, which streams on Amazon, had the bad fortune to emerge when the TV schedule felt overstocked with “traumedies,” of varying quality, many of them about standup comics. It was a wave influenced, and sometimes directly supported, by Louis C.K., the creator of the brilliantly unsettling “Louie” (more on him in a moment). On “One Mississippi,” Tig is a confessional radio host, not a comic. She’s also an unusual sort of sitcom protagonist. She’s not a clown with big appetites or a kooky naïf. She’s not a narcissist, either, except insofar as anyone who wants you to hear her side of the story is a narcissist. Instead, she’s a watchful introvert, guarded and adult. Her deadpan style faintly resembles that of Dick Cavett, had Cavett been a lesbian from the Deep South who was molested as a child.

Tig’s family, with whom she’s intimate but not close, is equally original and sharply drawn. There’s her brother, Remy (the wonderful Noah Harpster, also of “Transparent”), a Civil War reënactor and a former high-school jock, who lives alone in the attic; and her stepfather, Bill, a stoical weirdo, movingly underplayed by John Rothman. Bill’s repressive rigidity—his quasi-Aspergian light-switch rituals—drives Tig nuts. “I’m your stepfather,” Bill announces, shortly after the funeral. “So, technically, we’re not related anymore.” And yet he’s grieving, too. When Tig discovers that her mother had a scandalous secret life (an affair, an unknown sibling—it’s a doozy), she blows up, disgusted at Bill’s cluelessness, and, by extension, at her own. As it turns out, she’s wrong about a lot of things, but that’s the show’s most generous quality: its bottomless compassion for anyone struggling to reconcile a messy family history, including the ugly stuff that can’t be papered over.

The stories are deceptively small: Bill loses his cat; Remy flirts with a woman he made fun of in high school; Tig gets crowned Queen of the Mardi Gras, in her mother’s place; she enters into a slow-burn courtship with her seemingly straight producer, Kate (played by Notaro’s wife, Stephanie Allynne). In Season 2, Remy tries out religion and Bill meets his soul mate, an African-American woman (Sheryl Lee Ralph) who shares his thermostat obsession. A handful of fantasy sequences are hit or miss. But the show pulls off audacious characterizations. When an evolution-denying, homophobic, breast-milk-hustling single mom dive-bombs into Remy’s life, she’s outrageous, but not a cartoon—she may be a bigot, but she’s also a respite from Remy’s family of skeptics, able to see him, through generous eyes, as a catch.

The show is often at its best when exploring such unusual angles on intimacy, among them Tig’s taste for feminine seducers who are, not unlike her mother, prone to disappearing acts. In the first season, Tig is briefly enchanted by a Bea Arthur-obsessed newscaster who bats her eyes at her during Mardi Gras. When the woman ghosts on Tig in the middle of a crisis—ditching her at a Ferron concert, in what may be the most lesbian plot ever on television—one of Tig’s friends notes, wisely, “Anybody who has a wrist tattoo that says ‘Be Honest’ is trying to tell you something about themselves.”

One of the primary arcs of the first season was about Tig’s having been molested as a child by Bill’s father. This isn’t a secret: Remy knows it, Bill knows it, and Tig mentions it in the pilot, as she looks at family photos and shouts, goofily, to her younger self, “Look! You’re getting molested!” But only Tig wants to address what happened, often through what Bill calls her “smart aleck” jokes, her reflexive method for jimmying locked family doors.

Then, in the first season’s finale, with Bill’s encouragement, Tig visits her mother’s grave. Throughout, we’ve gotten flashbacks of Tig’s mom, a stylish iconoclast who carved a wild life from a staid one. The graveside scene becomes a remarkable, trippy fantasy sequence, a kind of slumber party, in which Tig and her mother (Rya Kihlstedt), who’s dressed in pajamas, trade stories about how they lost their virginity. Suddenly, other women buried nearby pop up to chime in. “Mine was a whole group of boys!” one young girl says, giggling and crawling out from behind her tombstone, trailing a blanket. “I got so muchattention. That’s how I got here.” “It’s so wild when someone you feel safe with turns into a total monster, right?” a middle-aged woman remarks, laughing along. “Quiet down!” says Bill, who shows up wearing a robe, the dad enforcing bedtime. “Lights out!” “We want to talk,” Tig’s mom whines, wheedling as if she were his teen-age daughter.

The scene makes your jaw drop—and it works because it takes for granted that stories like this are a common part of women’s lives. It makes the pathological ordinary. It also throws a curveball comedically, by putting the power of the “rape joke” into the hands of the victim. This has been a growing theme among female comedy writers: it shows up in “Inside Amy Schumer,” “Girls,” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” as well as in the sweet lesbian-marriage series “Take My Wife,” which includes a montage of comedians talking about having been raped.

The second season revisits these questions in a way that feels designed to shock on another level. The final two episodes feature a story line about a powerful male producer who has showered Tig with smarmy praise, impressed by the “dark material” in her radio show. During a pitch meeting with Kate, the producer unzips his pants and masturbates under the desk, his hands just out of sight. It’s a beautifully filmed sequence: his image blurs as Kate freezes, and the moment captures her panic and disorientation, her paralysis in the crisis. He behaves as if everything were normal. Later on, he insists that nothing happened.

The sequence seems to echo rumors that have circulated about Louis C.K. himself—even though Louis C.K., his frequent collaborator Blair Breard, and his manager, Dave Becky, are all executive producers of “One Mississippi,” their names in the credits. In recent interviews, Notaro has said that Louis, who had promoted her one-woman standup show on his Web site, did not participate in the writing of “One Mississippi”—and she has argued that he should address the rumors. Louis has responded, in interviews, that he doesn’t know why Notaro is bringing them up at all.

A TV review can’t investigate rumors; that’s a job for other forms of journalism. But these scenes are subversive, and effective, precisely because they use the master’s tools—“creative nonfiction,” streaked with surrealism—to point the camera in a different direction. On “One Mississippi,” the focus is not on the producer’s motives—his predation or pathos or, really, anything else about him. It’s on Kate, who, like Tig, has been through a lifetime of men who crossed the line of consent, then acted as if there were no line. There’s a different kind of assertion of power at work here. It’s a tricky story about telling tricky stories, and about how you make art from the ones you’ve been told not to tell. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the October 9, 2017, issue, with the headline “Show and Tell.”

Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.